And i’m scoping a 2025 mobility plan in Cleveland and want to staff a planner who can own the GIS stack (ArcGIS Pro + PostGIS, some Python) rather than split it with IT — what titles and salary bands are you using for that hybrid? If you’ve hired for this lately, did you find stronger candidates under “GIS Planner” or “Transportation Data Analyst,” and did ArcGIS Urban experience sway you?
Post as Transportation Data Analyst; ArcGIS Pro + PostGIS, $90–110k; “own the GIS stack,” Urban preferred.
We filled this as “Transportation GIS Engineer (Planning)” and got a stronger pool than “GIS Planner”; $105–125k in Cleveland, and a 30‑min screen restoring a PostGIS dump and publishing from Pro made Urban a nice‑to‑have. @mjones76 would you let them own SDE/admin, not just layers?
I’ve had the best signal with a 45‑min live screen: give them the Cleveland GTFS zip and ask them to load it into PostGIS, add a couple indexes, and wire an ArcGIS Pro query layer — watching their approach shows who can “own the GIS stack.” Urban is nice but I wouldn’t gate on it; would you consider a short paid exercise instead of a take‑home?
I’d post it as “Planning Data Engineer” to pull in planner‑devs and budget about $105–120k in Cleveland if you truly need someone who can “stand up Postgres on day one” — hire once, cry once… My best screen is a short repo task: hand them the CLE GTFS (https://openmobilitydata.org/p/greater-cleveland-regional-transit-authority/347), ask for indexes, a simple LTS‑style segment table, and a connection from desktop GIS with basic docs. If you can flex to Senior for a standout, retention improves; do you need Urban in year one, or is network analysis the core?